Sap Season

Things have been rather sappy around here lately. By that I do not mean "sappy" as in mushy, romantic kind of way. I'm referring to the weather.

It is early spring and that's the time to see all the sap buckets hung on the sugar maples. There are still a few farms that do that sort of thing around here. (And I know the Burt Farm in the town of Ohio, New York, near the Bolt Hole still uses buckets in their sugar bush.) Some sap collectors have gone to hanging plastic tubing from tree to tree and gather their sap in 1000 gallon tanks along the road.

The recent full moon takes the name "Sap Moon" from the activities that take place in the sugar bush. With the daytime highs ranging above 35 degrees and the nighttime lows dropping to the teens and low 20s, the sap in the maple trees flows heavily during the day. Up it flows during the day carrying nutrients to the buds at the tips of each branch and twig and down it flows at night to avoid the freezing that could shatter the small phloem and xylem tubes within those twigs.

But the buds do not swell and burst into flower yet. They are gathering materials within their folded scales in preparation for that event, of course, but when that occurs, or even if the buds get swollen to the point of near bursting, the syrup maker's season is over. Bud sap is inferior to that which is collected at the tail end of winter and the very beginning of spring.

The gathering of the sap is just the beginning of the syrup making process, of course. It will take 7 gallons to 10 gallons of sap to make one gallon of good quality syrup. And to get that reduction, you've got to boil away all that extra water. To get maple sugar, you'll have to boil all the water away.

Farms that make some maple syrup on the side have special equipment and structures to do all that boiling in. If you wanted to do it on a very small scale, you could do it in your kitchen but I recommend--based upon past experience--that you do not. Should you decide to try, be prepared to spend a week cleaning all the walls and replacing all your wallpaper. That is once serious amount of steam you are going to produce. (I did it with just about 1 gallon of sap from some red maple trees--definitely inferior in sugar content--and got 1/4 cup of syrup for the effort. Steam-cleaned the entire kitchen, however! And had to replace the decorative border at the top of each wall when the paste just gave up the ghost!)